Trying to raise money online for your organization, church or group can be difficult. Without the correct “web-tools” in place to help you capitalize on fundraising opportunities you could be missing out. If you’re like most organizations, you invest a lot of time and even a little money to create awareness about your fundraising efforts and causes on a regular basis.
It’s not easy getting others to give in general. It can be especially hard online, even for the most worthy causes. The people you connect with make small donations and leave, never to be seen or heard from again! Sound familiar? Or maybe you’ve already set up one-time donation options on your website, and you’re researching new donation channels for your organization? Or perhaps you’re just trying to establish some level of predictability for your fundraising to help budget for the future?
Whatever your reason might be for discovering this blog post, we’re glad you did. Setting up flexible recurring donations can make a BIG impact on fundraising. Adding a simple recurring donation widget to your website will allow visitors to give whatever they can afford AND select the frequency they wish to give (that last part being the key).
People often can afford to give “a little” every so often but will inevitably forget it in today’s overly stimulating world. However, by offering website visitors the option of giving on a regular basis, you can gain so much more from each interaction. Collecting donations in a typical online payment scenario limits your opportunity to a single donation or interaction. In a post-recurring payment world, interacting with a prospective donor has infinite opportunities.
Benefits of Recurring Donations
That’s the beauty of implementing recurring options for your online visitors; it maximizes the opportunity of each interaction because people can subscribe and donate automatically on a schedule they choose. People can select the amount they wish to donate and the frequency (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, or a custom schedule). The system will then automatically collect the donations using their stored payment method on file (credit, debit, ACH, PayPal, etc.).
We figured we would show you how to offer recurring donations specifically on the BigCommerce platform in a short tutorial below.
You’ll need the PayWhirl app for BigCommerce to get started.
Setting Up Recurring Donations on BigCommerce
- Setup donation PLANS in PayWhirl
- Setup donation WIDGETS in PayWhirl
- Embed your widget into BigCommerce (or whatever website platform you use)
In this example, we will set up a recurring donation widget. This will allow your customers to input any amount they wish for their donation (aka a flexible payment form). Then, we’ll forward customers to a pricing table widget so they can select their desired frequency.
Set Up Donation Plans in PayWhirl
First, we need to create PLANS in PayWhirl for each frequency you would like your customer to be able to select (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly or on specific dates). The plans will all cost $0 because we just want them to set the frequency of our subscription. We will forward people to another widget where they can input the amount they would like to donate.
Setup three frequency options for visitors to choose from:
Weekly – The Plan should bill $0 every week, and we’ll use no limit for the number of installments so it continues indefinitely.
Monthly—The plan should bill $0 every month, and we’ll use no limit for the number of installments, so it continues indefinitely.
Yearly—The plan should bill $0 every year, and we’ll use no limit for the number of installments, so it continues indefinitely.
Set Up Donation Widgets in PayWhirl
Once you have your plans set up, we can move along to set up our “build-a-donation” checkout funnel. We will create two widgets to accomplish this:
Widget #1 – Pricing Table includes all three of your plans (frequency options) as sections in the widget.
Widget #2 – Payment Form with “flexible” selected for the type
After creating both widgets, you can chain them together to create your funnel. You do this using the “Forward to Widget” setting to forward to the second in the first widget. You’ll also want to ensure the clear cart on reload setting is set to NO in your pricing table widget (#2).
Embed Widget into Platform
The last step is to copy & paste the embedded code from your FIRST widget with 3 plans into a page on BigCommerce. After doing this, visitors to your website can start donating on a recurring basis!
For more information, please refer to our support document on how to set up recurring donations. If you have any questions about recurring donations or implementing recurring payments for your business, church, or organization, please feel free to reach out to our support team.
Looking for more? Check out these blog posts: sample thank-you letters for donors here and how to increase monthly recurring revenue with PayWhirl.
